Porridge

ONE POEM – Mary Chydiriotis

a chant begins
a loud doleful wail
smear my body in holy oil
adorn my head with your crown of thorns

Midnight Games – Madeehah Reza

It’s not that she wasn’t happy for her sister, far from it. Nadia only wished she could hold on to her for a little longer.

ONE POEM — Alanna Offield

My soles are gelatinous, a mixture of blood, and yoke.

COMFORT FOODS // ONE POEM – Dea Guri

my father wanted to recreate the grapes
grow his own over our tiny backyard in the suburbs just outside the city
his vision was three separate plants,
arching and twisting their vines from our neighbor’s garage to ours

ONE POEM – Kate LaDew

I swirl my eyes inside the paint
tears forming at the edges of me

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner that Held Them: Managing Isolation and Becoming the Fabric of a Place – Joanna Mason

January and the New Year are often dreaded in their insistence that we look back on what we have achieved, or what we meant to. This year, the looming of March feels the same, with its marking of the anniversary of the initial lockdown. It is easy to be hard on the progress you have…

ONE POEM – Nicola Maclean

Zones one to three have become a long-distance relationship.
Underground, Hades and his sardine dead
reach their eleventh hour

FLASH FICTION – Kirsty Crawford

I sway and I spin, I smile. Sometimes even in perfect moments, you begin to feel the cold creep in.

THREE POEMS – Susan Moon

My mother packed eggs sunny side up,
Spam slices golden-browned to perfection
tucked into my lunchbox.

COMFORT FOODS // ONE POEM – Lindy Biller

and what does it mean
that her blood still sings
through the Old Quarter
of my veins?

ONE POEM – Alice Foo

The angel comes unbidden
on a Thursday morning,
knocking briskly, handing me
a pineapple and thirteen coral-tinted roses.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Jessica Swank

Through photography and sculpture, I question how the manipulation of behaviour and patterns dehumanises society.

ONE POEM – Sidrah Zubair

will you give me gentle hand grips and the space I need
to feel sorry for myself?

A Place in the Past – Kirsty Crawford

To see a place, to see all of its contours and edges, its soft shape, you must leave for a while and look at it from the outside, return as someone different, someone older. I grew up on the Isle of Arran and left at seventeen, desperate to move to the city and become someone…

TWO POEMS – Kali Richmond

the diver submerged for so long
we presume her dead
shark food
scattershot of matter sinking deeper than cameras

ART – Geneviève Dumas

Because of the pandemic, we didn’t have any Olympics this summer, so I decided to reproduce the Olympic coverage in July by printing (screen printing) over selected pictures from the Montreal Olympics of 1976

ONE POEM – Gerry Stewart

Spread out before you,
whipped and bright coloured,
dripping with sauces,
a world of unimagined flavours,
untranslatable.

ART: Natalie Bradford

Through countless retrievals, our memories of precious moments lose their ‘truth.’

ONE POEM – Ryan Clark

Below the wall the soil
leeches contaminants
from an artificial hill rising
out of the field like a wart.

ONE POEM – Barnaby Smith

the small hours are all about compost—
wanderlust of priceless larvae
& transcendent effect of unremarkable habits

ONE POEM – Athena Ramos

Around December, our grove
of banana plants grew heavy, saba begging:
to be picked, coated in brown sugar, wrapped
in lumpia wrapper, and fried in sugary oil.

ART: MY BALCONY GARDEN – Labdhi Shah

‘As I listened to music and wrote poems, the space came alive, became my balcony garden, and gave new life to me.’

ONE POEM – Kate J Wilson

you said it’s tradition in Spain that as the clock
strikes twelve we must scoff a grape a chime
one at a time, but quickly as any left over become
unsalvageable, each one a rotten, failing month.

ONE POEM – Angeliki Ampelogianni

our language, a softness taken root
a teaspoon of rain over us
as we greet this new life

The View from Here – Lettie Mckie

A version of this piece first appeared on Trampset In April, the reality of the pandemic fades into the background as my family deals with our own internal crisis. The house is in Kemsing, a southern English village in the Kent countryside. It is nestled on the slopes of the North Downs, a range of…

My Unsung Sheroes – Susan Moon

Just a spoonful satisfyingly sears on the way down, tickling all the microvilli on its magic school bus trip through the body. A taste so tangy, a flavor so fearless. Anything but diluted, the way I’d always told myself to be.

ONE POEM – Rose Foran

I saw them. In the mind’s eye.
A vision once obscured, then clarified.

VIDEO: 2020aliveness – Maggz

‘where reality and subconsciousness overlap and everything blends.’

ONE POEM – Jhilam Chattaraj

Cubed potatoes, sliced onions—their oil bath
followed by a tender sauna.

ONE POEM – Imogen Osborne

We return to find
the magnolia still
bruising itself into blossom.

ONE POEM – Bradley David

Then to discover we both go
first for that old chipped blue soup bowl

Is that love?

Some observations concerning the desirability of a new paradigm for medicine

We physicians have never had a clearly defined mission. That mattered less when expectations were lower and we could do less. Now though, the reigning paradigm is grounded in basic science, excessively confident, inpatient-centric, and broadly focused on treatment of symptoms and signs, on diagnosis and therapy. The development of a new medical paradigm seems…

The Piano Man – Rebecca Turner

That night that the piano man and I first slept together was the night we discovered the pleasure of talking aloud about murder.

ONE POEM – Denisa Vítová

I spilled pinot noir on the bed sheet
and said I was a virgin.

ONE POEM – Lucy Holme

Unlike a jellyfish, she has a brain but doubts her instinct for survival.
swoop siren, dive under.

ONE POEM – David Linklater

The train leans through
the Highland line, Inverness
to Fearn, wheat either side.
This carriage bows for you.

TranSItion – Seigar

“Ignorance produces hate, knowing is the best way to tackle ignorance, and empathy is the only path to love.”

COMFORT FOODS // TWO POEMS – Daniele Nunziata

I’ve tried planting potatoes since you left,
but they never grow the way they did for you.

Failing to Eat a Local Delicacy – Michael O’Mahony

Lorighittas are a type of pasta made in one small village, Morgongiori, on a side of a mountain on the east of Sardinia. Only the women of this village, and only some of them, know how to make lorighittas. A lorighitta is effectively a woven pasta made from a dough of semolina and water. Each…

COMFORT FOODS // Flour and Oil — Jacey de la Torre

Those are some peoples’ stories, some peoples’ histories, but they aren’t ours.